


breaking at the bridges

by somethingradiates



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Emotional Abuse, Gen, Parent Death, Physical Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-28
Updated: 2012-03-28
Packaged: 2017-11-02 15:21:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/370458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somethingradiates/pseuds/somethingradiates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>sometimes the most difficult things don’t have anything to do with a vicious murder or serial bomber. sometimes they’re as simple as a blood vessel quietly bursting behind a man’s brain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	breaking at the bridges

“John,” Sherlock says. It’s a Sunday night in early November, and London is already unseasonably cold, although they've been blessed with a lack of snow.

John glances up from his paper. He’s not really reading it, just glancing through to find out if their last case—a serial burglar targeting St. John’s Wood—got any attention. It had been exceptionally easy to solve, and they’d been paid very handsomely. John wouldn’t object to more cases like that, instead of, say, the bombing plot they’d been handed two weeks ago and had solved three days ago.

“Could the clinic do without you for most of next week?” Sherlock isn’t looking at him, choosing to investigate his nails instead. John’s initial response is frustration—Sherlock would naturally wait until Sunday night to tell him that they’ve got other things to do—but something in Sherlock’s tone gives him pause.

“I would imagine,” he says after a moment. “New case?”

“My father died on Friday evening,” Sherlock says, as though he’s discussing the weather, or something he found on the telly. “I’d like someone I can stand to be there.”

John stares for just a moment. “Right,” he says. “Should I bother giving condolences?”

“No,” Sherlock says, and that’s that.

\--

The next day’s train ride is uneventful, although one woman does recognize Sherlock from the news. He’s distracted and oddly polite, although he declines her request for a picture. It’s late by the time they get to Exmouth, but there’s a gleaming rental car waiting for them, and Sherlock wordlessly gets into the driver’s seat.

“I didn’t realize you’d called for a car,” John says, after a little while. They’re out of the city—although Exmouth doesn't look like much of a city, not after being in London for as long as they have—and the land, from what he can see, is getting rather wilder. They’re close to the coast, although the road is taking them further inland.

“I didn’t.” When John glances over at him, Sherlock is tapping a cigarette out of its pack. John wisely refrains from commenting. “I believe my aunt did.”

“Not Mycroft?”

“Mycroft isn’t attending the funeral, or any of the services after,” Sherlock says dispassionately.

John’s gaze returns to the window. “Surprising,” he says. “Mycroft seems like he would go to something like this, regardless of his opinion of your father. Expectations and all that.”

“They had a row when I was ten,” Sherlock says, in that same tone, like he’s reading something from a book that doesn’t interest him. “Mycroft left the house. I don’t believe they’ve spoken since then.” He pauses. “Or, rather, I don’t believe they _had_ spoken since then. I suppose I had better mind my tenses.”

John doesn’t know what to say to that, so he settles with not saying anything. Mycroft, from what he’s seen and heard, seems to be very interested in the way things should be, regardless of the way things currently are, and the idea that he and his father had a row big enough to completely take that relationship apart takes John just a bit aback.

“So,” he says, after they’ve been driving for another five minutes. Sherlock has the window down a couple of inches, flicking the ash out every so often, and the roar of the wind seems louder than it actually is. “How long do we need to stay?”

“The funeral is on Tuesday,” Sherlock says, and takes a final long pull on his cigarette before he flicks it out of the window. “According to my aunt, I was named as executor of his estate, so I have the privilege of fighting with my relatives over who gets the house.”

“Are you taking it?”

“God, no,” Sherlock says dismissively. “I’d burn it to the ground if it was under my name. I’ll sell it sometime this week.”

\--

“You’ll sell this within the week?” John’s voice is low, and he’s leaning in to speak, even though there’s no one around to hear. The house they’re approaching is gigantic; John doesn’t know much about houses—he lived in Surrey his entire life in a three-bedroom two-story townhouse—but he’d very much doubt that Sherlock can get this on and off the market in seven days.

“Twelve bedrooms,” Sherlock says, not troubling to keep his voice down. “A wing devoted to servants’ quarters, two libraries, two kitchens, cellars underneath most of the ground floor. It sits on a hundred and fifteen acres, complete with extensive stables, a two-story guest cottage, and a lake nestled away in the woodlands south of the manor.” He glances at John. “Give that to a real estate agent, say you want a million pounds and it’ll be gone in a day. It’s worth seven point three million, the last I knew.”

“Less than a day,” John says. Sherlock doesn’t say anything until they get to the main doors, where he glances up at the engravings over the frosted glass.

“Holmes House,” he says, a little disgustedly, and doesn’t speak for the rest of the night. 

\--

When they duck into the house through the servants’ entrance the next morning, there’s no one in the house but them—well, the staff, but they’re clearly used to being largely invisible and only the elderly butler says anything to Sherlock, calling him _young master_ once before Sherlock puts a firm stop to that.

John isn’t going to say anything about it, but Sherlock is very clearly uncomfortable in this house. He wonders for a moment if Sherlock would tell him if he asked—but he doubts anything would come of it. They’re in Sherlock’s old study—they both slept out in the gatekeeper’s cottage; Sherlock had refused to sleep in the manor—and it’s spotless, as the presence of two dozen maids attests to, every book in its rightful place. The bookshelves are floor-to-ceiling, and the ceilings are at least twelve feet high. There are books on the top shelf, and there’s a rolling ladder attached to one of the higher shelves up top and one of the lowest shelves on the bottom. If John was about a decade younger, or maybe two, he’d try it out.

John takes down a medical textbook. _Atlas of Anatomy_ , fourth edition, first published in 1923, fourth edition published in 1974. He’d used the seventh edition in the nineties when he was in school, when the book was new. He thinks he has it in a box somewhere. Likely at his parents’ house.

“Surprised you didn’t have the sixth edition,” he says. “It would’ve been published in… I dunno, the late eighties, probably. So you’d have been eight or nine.” He flips through a few of the pages offhandedly, then adds, “Perfect age to start going through college-level medical texts.”

“Seventeen closets in this house,” Sherlock says, running a spindly finger over the spine of a book. John can read TOLSTOY, but not the sun-faded title. “And a skeleton in every one.”

John looks up from the book, closes it, and slides it back into its place. Now that he looks, there are a few spots missing their books, although there are at least a hundred books to replace every missing one.

“What do you mean?”

“Skeletons in the closet, John, it’s an idiom, meaning a secret th—”

“I know what the phrase means, thank you, Sherlock,” John says, and leans one hip against the desk nearest him. “Forget it; you aren’t going to tell me if I ask.”

“Very astute,” Sherlock says. “By the way, I did have the sixth edition. I took it with me when I left.”

“When was that?”

“The sixth edition was published in 1989,” Sherlock says, idly paging through the book he’d been looking at earlier. “The seventh was published in 1998. I didn’t buy that until after I had left.”

“Seventeen,” John says, after a moment of thought. “Didn’t buy it until after you’d moved, so you were careful with funds, at least for a little while. Gave yourself a couple of months to adjust to the city. Did you go straight to London?”

Sherlock nods, putting the book back.

“Pretty far away.” John is watching him, and he knows Sherlock knows.

“That was the point,” Sherlock says. When he leaves, John doesn’t stop him.

\--

“That’s Valeria,” Sherlock says that night, leaning in to speak in John’s ear. He’s talking about the only person in the room that seems to be younger than them; she’s tall and skinny, with something of the goblin in her face. She looks intelligent, and altogether not pretty. She has the same eyes, John notices, as Sherlock, like pieces of aquamarine studded in a face too pale for the color.

“Cousin?”

Sherlock nods slightly, and before he can say anything, a lanky older gentleman wearing a monocle (John didn’t know people still wore those, but he has to say he’s not that surprised that a Holmes would) approaches him and begins to speak at length about turning the house into a school. Sherlock could not possibly be more disinterested, but the gentleman apparently can’t take a hint.

John has stayed next to Sherlock for the entire night; everyone is in the east reception hall, all of the Holmes family—not the Archers, because, as Sherlock told him early, in a moment of brief honesty, that his mother’s family had little enough to do with his father while his mother was alive, and now that she’s dead that interaction has decreased to nothing. He says, too, that his mother married rather beneath herself, and John, looking around, finds that a little hard to believe. The Holmes family clearly comes from money, and they’re one of the increasingly rare families of old wealth that have managed to keep it—and not only that, to increase it.

Sherlock, however, may not have been speaking about his mother’s social status. John has noticed that none of the Holmes seem particularly upset about the death of a man that seemed to be the patriarch of the family; there have been a few perfunctory apologies, but they’re quickly followed by a launch into vague, evasive questions regarding Sherlock’s plans for the house, for the fortune, for everything.

John wonders, for a moment, if any of them are sad at all that a man died. Sherlock certainly doesn’t seem to be, and John knows there’s a reason. He just wishes he knew what it was.

\--

“There’s not going to be any kind of religious ceremony,” Sherlock says, straightening his tie and picking his cigarette up out of the ashtray on the desktop. “My father very firmly believed that there was no God.” He pauses, then adds, “Christopher Hitchens attended a family function in the early nineties as his guest. I believe my great-aunt Agatha tossed her brandy into his face.”

“Wow,” John says. There’s a moment of quiet; they’re holed up in the gatekeeper’s cottage again, while the rest of the family—although John is beginning to be hesitant about calling them a family—is in the manor, preparing for the funeral. “Does Mycroft know?”

Sherlock glances at him via the mirror. He cuts rather a dashing figure; his suit is as well-tailored as John would expect, and oddly enough the cigarette between his fingers makes him more… not debonair, but something like it. He looks tired, though, a kind of tired that John has rarely seen in him. “Of course,” he says, without malice. “I knew he wouldn’t attend the funeral, but I had to make sure. I’m not fond of my brother, but I wouldn’t—” He cuts himself off, brings the cigarette to his lips again. John puts a hand on his arm, and Sherlock doesn’t shake it off.

\--

 

“A belt,” Sherlock says, late, late that night, after John pads outside in bare feet, pajama bottoms and a coat. Sherlock is leaning against the wall next to the door, smoking a cigarette, eyes on the smoke that curls out of his mouth and floats away. It’s damp and cold, too close to the sea and too early in the year for snow. “That was his favorite. Terribly unimaginative, for a man like him.”

John swallows. He can’t say he wasn’t thinking it, but he didn’t expect Sherlock to say it aloud.

“Why?” He takes a spot next to the younger man, and his shoulder aches from the cold. He feels old.

“He wanted perfection, which I could give him,” and a long drag, “and obedience, which I wouldn’t.”

“Was that why Mycroft left?” John knows perfectly well how pointless it is to say that he’s sorry, or express—anything, really.

“No.” Sherlock pinches his cigarette out and tosses it into the grass. He’s barefoot, too, John notices, and wonders how long he’s been out here. “I think it was rather more mental with Mycroft. My father was very fond of mind games.” He’s quiet for a moment, looking at the sky over the edge of the trees that surround the grounds.

John thinks, for a moment, about a young Sherlock taking off into the woods, off to the lake that he’d mentioned on Sunday evening, maybe, to be alone, to be away, and wonders if there are any good memories here at all. He doubts it.


End file.
